Amazon Mechanical Turk Review

NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Amazon Mechanical Turk is the grandaddy that ushered in the whole "microwork" trend back in the mid-2000s (and whether that's a good or bad thing I'll let you decide.) Users can simply sign in with their existing Amazon account or create a new one and begin working immediately. In theory, requesters can post any sort of task they want, but the ones you'll most commonly find are looking up information via a Google search, transcription, translations, marking and tagging images, small writing tasks and surveys. These tasks are referred to individually as HITs.

Pay tends to be very minimal - HITs paying $1 or more are in relatively short supply and over $5 is a rare bird indeed. Turk's money-making potential comes more from doing smaller, very short tasks for anywhere from .05 to .20 in large numbers (postings of these are called "batches.") Payments can be made by Paypal or through direct deposit to a bank account. If you add a bank account they will verify it by making two random deposits of a few cents which can take a few days. There is no limit to withdrawal amount or number of times and the transfers generally occur 1 to 3 business days after request.



SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Amazon is pretty much the king of all sites in this category and it's one of the primary appeals of Turk. There's basically no worries about payment and turnaround time is about as fast as it gets - at least on Amazon's end.

The one hitch here is that the requesters first have to approve payment, and they don't seem to be put on a time limit to do so. In theory, they can leave your work unpaid for weeks (or months) and you really don't have any recourse. It's very important to install a third-party browser add-on called Turkopticon, which gives you access to a database of requester rankings created by other Turkers. By checking Turkopticon ratings religiously I've done over 1500 HITs on Turk so far and never once been burned (one lady took a month to pay 20 cents one time, but other than that everything has come in in less than a week.)

 INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

Up until 2012 Amazon freely allowed workers from almost anywhere in the world, but they had a lot of problems with fraud and poor quality work from outside the U.S. so they started restricting new accounts. As far as I know there is still no hard geographical restriction in place, but workers outside the U.S. reportedly have a much harder time getting verified and have to submit a greater amount of personal identity verification information.

The individual requesters can also see what country you are from and can filter out certain countries. Unfortunately, people from certain countries like India and Pakistan will find that everyone from their country is blocked from a good number of HITs even if Amazon approves their account. 



STARTING OUT

Once an account is verified there aren't many restrictions on work. For the first ten days you will only be able to submit 100 HITs per day, and you must have at least one successfully accepted each of those days. Earnings will also not be paid out until this "probation" period is completed. Once that restriction is lifted you can submit as many HITs as you like, but keep in mind you can only accept 25 simultaneously no matter what your status is.

Mechanical Turk doesn't have a formal reputation system or "tiers" like some other sites. It does have some quality ratings in place, however.

The most common way that requesters attempt to filter for quality workers is by number of accepted HITs. Amazon keeps track of how many jobs you've done successfully. At certain thresholds, you'll see more lucrative jobs from regular requesters start to open up. The first of these thresholds is at 100 HITs, then at 500. The big threshold is 1000, which opens up a number of academic surveys and regular requesters that pay decently. Prior to 1000 HITs you'll probably struggle to reach even 10 bucks a day sinking most of your work day into the site. After 1000 you can start counting on $10 as a daily minimum if you put in at least a couple of hours.

There's another minor threshold at 5000 that opens a couple of regular requesters that are decent, but if you ever want to move on from this being a $10-20 part-time thing you have to attain Amazon's coveted Master's Qualification. Unfortunately, like the process of becoming a Jedi in the old Star Wars Galaxies online game, the requirements for this qualification are not made public, apparently very long and obtuse, and it often seems to be awarded totally at random. It's not something you can count on after a certain point as I've seen people on forums with HITs in the tens of thousands under their belt, good reputations and years of service complaining that they still haven't gotten the qual yet.

If you do happen to get it, though?




Qualifications can also be made up and assigned by individual requesters. Sometimes you'll have to do a few trial jobs for them to prove the quality of your work before they will give you their qual. Some quals are simply available upon request but can be revoked if you do poor quality work. One qual that a newcomer should immediately get is the Adult Content qual. Even if you don't want to do "adult" jobs (one very common job available is tagging porn images and videos!), many non-adult HITs still require this qual as there is some tiny remote possibility of adult content sneaking into them.

PROBLEMS WITH MECHANICAL TURK

There's little in the way of technical problems to complain about. Turk has a fairly well designed and fast interface and works like clockwork.

The only real issue is the relatively low pay regardless of how much time you put in - it's just not something you can get very much from if you're trying to support yourself entirely online. The lack of a rating system for requesters is the one major oversight of the system, but that's reconciled nicely by Turkopticon.


FINAL VERDICT - WORTH IT

You'll see people reporting they make $50 a day off Turk regularly even without the Masters qual, but that's because they also sink 10 to 12 hours a day into it. It's perfect for people who want to turn a World of Warcraft addiction into a profitable use of time but most people are not going to be able to handle the repetitive simple tasks for that long. It's worth it, but only if you're willing to grind at $5 or less per day for at least the first two weeks to establish your reputation, and even then it's only reliably good for $10-20 a day without sinking ridiculous time into it. Sometimes even that $10 is the difference between making it over the hump for the month and not, though, so I recommend adding it to your rotation as a solid backstop during the dry periods if nothing else.